The expedition was difficult, but the waiting may be more so.
Under the sun on Nikumaroro Island, they sweated in temperatures that reached 120 degrees. Their work began at daylight and ended at the dinner hour. For days, neither the dense tropical vegetation nor the steeply sloped beach yielded a clue.
And then: a piece of aluminum, and another, and another - debris from the wreckage of an airplane, perhaps the one that has eluded discovery since its disappearance on July 2, 1937.
Only time - and painstaking analysis - will tell whether Richard Gillespie's October expedition to the South Pacific has solved one of the great modern-day mysteries: What really happened to Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, after their twin-engine Lockheed Electra vanished on its attempted round-the-world flight?
For now, Gillespie must content himself with poring over microfilm blueprints of airplane parts and awaiting an official thumbs-up or thumbs-down
from experts in the field.
"It's fascinating, but it's also agonizing," says Gillespie, executive director of the Wilmington-based Tighar, the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery. "The nature of the investigative process is that you are working as hard as you can to prove that something is untrue (while) praying that it is true. The greatest fear, in historical analysis, is the fear of kidding yourself."
It was with reluctance that Gillespie got involved in the Earhart project in 1988. He was skeptical that anyone could unravel the layers of Earhart myth and legend that had accumulated over the years. The most persistent rumor had Earhart a spy, abducted by the Japanese.
Two retired aviation navigators, however, convinced Gillespie that Tighar - a nonprofit group with a solid reputation in academic circles - should join the search. Their re-creation of Earhart's journey - using celestial navigation, as Noonan would have - led them to pinpoint Nikumaroro (formerly called Gardner Island) as the site where the plane went down.
In 1989, Gillespie led his first expedition to the remote, uninhabited island. It was, somewhat remarkably, the first thorough search of the island, a footprint-shaped atoll - 3 1/2 miles long by 1 mile wide - surrounded by a coral reef.
The trip produced no conclusive evidence, but gave the searchers some hints they were in the right place. Gillespie formulated a theory that the plane had landed on the flat reef at a low tide, then been swallowed by the sea in a storm.
